The Poetry of the Forties in Britain by A.T. Tolley (review)

in such general terms and with so little detailed analysis or commentary that one is left convinced only that Larkin is a mid-twentieth-century British poet - and that can be news to no one. (P.E. MITCHELL) A.T. Tolley. The Poetry of the Forties in Britain Carleton University Press 1985. 394. $14.95 One of the most dense myths shrouding British poetry of the forties is that it is a poetry shrouded in dense myth. This myth was given currency during the 1950s, when the Movement poets attempted to make a place for themselves by fashioning a highly flammable straw man out of their immediate literary predecessors. Thus, for Robert Conquest, the poetry of the forties was uniformly one of apocalyptic romanticism, composed of images 'tapped straight from the unconscious.' This view became the accepted one. In the sixties, Kenneth Allott wrote of 'the neo-romantic forties: when poets tended 'to become intoxicated with words, to create myths and to indulge in Gothic effects.' Even after the Movement waned, such descriptions persisted, as in Alfred Alvarez's dismissal of the 'drumrolling forties.' 'One purpose of this book: A.T. Tolley writes in his Preface, 'is to take the poetry of the forties out of this context and subjectit to a proper critical and historical appraisal.' Tolley succeeds admirably, and one of the clearest and most convincing impressions left by The Poetry ofthe Forties in Britain is of the immensely varied nature of forties poetry. Yes, the drums do roll in some places - in the rhetoric of George Barker or W.S. Graham, in the visionary mythologizing of Kathleen Raine or Vernon Watkins, and in the bottle-littered front yard of Dylan Thomas. But there are so many other sounds, ranging from the intellectually clear and socially responsive pieces that appeared in Now or Penguin New Writing (with its circulation ofover one hundred thousand!); to the ironic and urbane modernism of Lawrence Durrell, Terence Tiller, and G.S. Fraser; the quiet and at times prosak colloqillalism of verse drama - much of it popularized through radio performance; the patient, closely observant war poetry of Alun Lewis, F.T. Prince, and many others; and even including such exotic tones as these timely Scots strains by Sidney Goodsir Smith: Tchaikovski man, I'm hearan yir Waltz 0 Flouers, A cry frae Russia fulls this autumn nicht; As gousty feU October's sabban in rna room As the frantic rammage Panzers brash on Moscow taun .. . Tolley's book does justice to the full range of forties poetry, with generous (in every sense) chapters on all the modes and movements HUMANITIES 133 remarked above, characterized by a fine balance of historical background and critical commentary. The admirably comprehensive bibliography, of great value to anybody interested in the period, testifies to the difficulty of giving a concise, coherent impression of the era's poetry. Yet Tolley is especially well suited to the task. As author of the 1975 Poetry of the Thirties, he possesses an enviable knowledge of the lineage of forties achievement, along with an eye for the many strong but unacknowledged continuities between the two eras. Also, his knowledge of what was going on around the poetry as well as in it - social and political circumstances , popular culture, the financial realities of book and periodical publication, the surprisingly heavy toll taken by the war on a generation of young writers - adds depth and resonance to his discussion of the poetry. It is what helps give the edge to this book over Linda Shire's illuminating but more circumscribed 1985 study, British Poetry ofthe Second World War. Finally, Tolley is temperamentally well suited to his task, emerging here as a master of the telling but fair quotation, the balanced final judgment that stands as definitive without being dogmatic, and even the double put-down, as when he follows his admission that 'it is hard to feel sorry for the man who could praise the literary movement to which he belonged as "organic ... with all the madness and sanity of a bowel movement'" (p 109) with the dry disclosure that 'Treece's publisher was T.5. Eliot's Faber and Faber.' If the forties was...